One of Nigeria’s foremost nationalists and patriots, Chief Ayo Adebanjo, who physically left our earth plane on February 14, this year was buried on Saturday, March 3, 2025. Before his body was lowered into his well crafted grave in his Yoruba homeland/home-town of Isanya Ogbo near Ijebu Ode in Ogun State, the funeral rites he more than rightly and richly deserved had been more than sufficiently done – and concluded. I regret fully that I could not make it to any of the classical events, especially the “Day of Tributes/Service of Songs” which happened at the Eko Hotels and Suites, Victoria Island, Lagos.

One or two of my Afenifere friends and brothers certainly looked out for me in vain, if I may say so. But this must be a wrong remark to make. I was not physically present on Wednesday, April 30, 2025 to commiserate with them, their associates and the Nigerian Tribune family. But my thought was sufficiently cool, dim and dark where I was as the events drew forth what they drew forth in the illumination of the expansive mind of the large-hearted personage who left at the very ripe age of nineteen-six years.

I personally consider this personage of huge frame in every respect as the real last loyalist of the one and only Obafemi Awolowo the everlastingly everlasting super-supreme leader of his people our people, of our homeland our homeland and of our country our country.

As the leader of Afenifere, I admired Chief Ayo Adebanjo for his perspicuous and stimulating direction which satisfied my particular needs as a nationalist and a patriot. He was an authentic, in fact, the authentic leader of the group and the de facto opposition leader of your country my country our country. I never physically met him in life. Indeed, I never ever thought of meeting him physically – although a very good friend of mine knew him closely and intimately and collaborated with him patriotically on the national question and project.

I tried to decipher through my friend the just gone man of every lion’s bravery and courage who could never be bought. My said friend is a graduate of English and a frontline senior lawyer as well whose instincts always supply his intellect with how to handle the Nigerian conundrum. My picture of Ayo Adebanjo partly derived from his own several snapshots and broad perspectives and pictures of him.

Another friend who belongs to the Nigerian Tribune stable and family – who valued and thought of Ayo Adebanjo highly in the context of his tremendous fearlessness and patriotic stirrings, encouraged me to read Say It as It Is, Ayo Adebanjo’s engaging autobiography when it immediately came out. As a matter of fact, my friend purchased the splendid text for me.

The autobiography stirred me stirringly to the extent that I had to label it glowingly in a study I embarked on with immeasurable gusto and joy at the time the book came out of the press and was ordered for me, and when it entered my writing hand and penetrated the depths of its joyful joy. It was my wish to do a review, an academic, intellectual, scholarly, and professional review, of the autobiography in this column.

My moving house at the time I did, however, aborted my desire. What will it matter now if I return to the desire now that the autobiographer has closed his eyes for ever? How will he now admire my nib and ink?
Ayo Adebanjo’s politics is/was the politics in which he wants/wanted to ensure the triumph of justice in the land not necessarily because he was a most senior lawyer but because justice is the basis of every healthy society; his politics is/was the politics in which as well he wants/wanted to restore the moral unity of the nation – his nation your nation our nation; in his politics he has/had no room or time to think of exploitation, of un-fairness, of dis-equilibrium.

This, among other reasons, accounted for why he and the Afenifere he led with honour and integrity and grit and steadfastness backed Peter Obi to the hilt in the last presidential election. He and Afenifere punctured the false impression that the Yoruba and the politicians of the mighty Chief Obafemi Awolowo School of Politics areanti-Igbo.

A study of Ayo Adebanjo (and of his Afenifere) is a study of the laws of character and of loyalty. From the iconic Awo loyalist I did not fail to notice that Awo and his supreme loyalists, dead or alive, living or not living, did not and do not hate the Igbos. Nothing is further, nothing has been further, from the lies, from all the absurdities, we –non-Igbos and Igbos – have/had been forced to perceive over the years. In Ayo Adebanjo (and Afenifere) we see his and his people’s denunciations of the trumpeters and flute players of un-progressive politics.

Now the remark I have just made rides me back to my conversation with Sehaji Jacob Oshodi, the Benin Nigerian universal mystic, in this column two Fridays ago. After Sehaji Jacob Oshodi’s training in London for the WNTV-WNBS, Ibadan, Obafemi Awolowo in the true spirit of nationalism sent him to Enugu in the Eastern Region of the Igbos to go assist the television/broadcasting station there to stand well.

Would an anti-Igbo Awolowo send an employee his government had trained in London and who just returned in 1960 to his Ibadan base without contributing anything to boot to WNTV-WNBS, be allowed to proceed to the East if Awo and his progressive-minded Yoruba nationalists and patriots were truly or realististically anti-Igbo (or anti-Azikiwe)? I will leave the anti-Awo loyalists to answer the simple question as best as they can.

Now that Ayo Adebanjo is dead and has been buried gloriously, I hope that plenty of the Afenifere people and loyalists – firm and not firm – will not lack the progressive sense to continue their patriotic duty and task until even after they crack the hors de combat of the anti-progressive forces.

In other words, I hope that now that the courageously courageous Ayo Adebanjo has been buried with the fanfare his heroic life deserves/deserved his fellow progressives, will not lack the faculty of submitting to the progressive, radical realities within themselves until the crack of doom of our country’s enemies is realised.

May Ayo Adebanjo’s sincerely patriotic ideals never depart from the land, this land that is your land my land our land! His era must not wane. Condolences to Ayo Adebanjo’s family, Afenifere and the Nigerian Tribune.
Afejuku can be reached via 08055213059.